Beryl Bainbridge: a riotous, macabre imagination

Before the result of the Man Booker Best of Bainbridge prize is announced, Alex
Clark explains why the author thoroughly deserves the recognition.

Dame Beryl Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize a record five timesPhoto: CORBIS

By Alex Clark

6:53PM BST 19 Apr 2011

Beryl Bainbridge united a riotous, macabre imagination with a talent for wit and compression; over the course of 18 darkly comic novels, she barely wasted a word.

The fact that she never won Britain's most celebrated literary prize is, in a sense, neither here nor there: the mantelpiece of her famously eccentric Camden house can hardly have been short of awards, and her real achievement lies in the legions of committed readers and scores of adulatory reviews her books prompted.

It is, nonetheless, lovely to have an excuse to revisit five of her novels and wonder what might have happened if a clutch of other novelists - Nadine Gordimer, AS Byatt and Ian McEwan among them - hadn't pipped her to the post. Bainbridge drew inspiration from her Liverpool upbringing, focusing on the drabness and misery of the city during, or in the aftermath, of the Second World War.

The first three novels in contention for the Best of Beryl prize depict lives desperate for a bit of pleasure or release, from the inexperienced young girl fascinated by a GI's glamour in The Dressmaker, to An Awfully Big Adventure, in which another ingénue finds her stint in a repertory company complicated by her feelings for its rakish director.

But Bainbridge never shied away from dealing a grim blow to her hopeful protagonists; one character in The Bottle Factory Outing finds herself summarily dispatched and floated off to sea in a hastily improvised casket.

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Later in her career, Bainbridge turned to historical events for material. Every Man For Himself is a bravura imagining of the doomed passengers on the Titanic. Similarly, Master Georgie used the Crimean War as a suitably vivid backdrop against which to depict the chaotic, complex life of her unorthodox hero.

It's impossible to say which way the vote will go - with any of these being worthy winners - but Every Man For Himself might just edge it.